What Are The 5 Biggest Web Design Mistakes?

The number one mistake in web design is to create your website using Flash technology. Although Flash sites are often very sexy and have very good graphics, you have to consider what your visitors are searching for. They want information about your products and services and most couldn’t care less that you have a Flash site – many will leave without even seeing what you have to offer.


Even though high speed connections are quite common, not everyone has them and by adding Flash you will make your site slow to load and risk a lot of visitors going elsewhere. Internet surfers are used to instant answers and don’t appreciate delays so why make them wait? For all your UK design needs go to web design UK.


The second mistake is trying to make your website look like a catalog with hundreds of links to different products on the front page and subsequent pages. This is normally done due to the fear of missing out on a sale or offer and people believe that they have to display everything. The total opposite of this is true.


Many Internet marketing studies have revealed that where the visitor is presented with too many choices they end up making none. This has been linked with information overload which you want to avoid at all costs. A better solution is to create categories for your products and a good search facility so that your visitors can find what they are looking for.


Creating a site that the top search engines Yahoo, Bing and Google can’t find is the third biggest mistake that you can make with web design. There are a lot of people who will tell you that you need just write for visitors and not for search engines. While there is truth in this, it is quite easy to write for your visitors and optimize for the search engines at the same time.


The smart thing to do is to see what people are typing into the search engines when they are looking for plumbers in London. As an example we will choose the term “Plumber in London" as the keywords most will be using. Well the web site needs to be optimized for this term. You need these keywords to appear a few times in your site and in the description and title of the web page. By doing this you will provide assistance to the search engines and they will understand that you are offering plumbing services in London.


A very common mistake, and number four in this article, is loading your site with too many pictures. Lots of pictures will slow down your site and more importantly will provide a distraction to your visitors so they may end up leaving without taking the action that you want. Google are now penalizing web sites with slow load times. It is well known that you have around 7 seconds to engage your reader. Some web sites take longer than that to display because they are full of graphics and you will lose a lot of visitors of your site is like this.


Getting inexperienced people to create your site and its content is the fifth mistake. Your web site should be your shop window where you want people to buy what you have to offer, contact you for more information or join your email newsletter list for further communications. Just let your web designer do what they are good at which is the design work while you or a hired copywriter produce the written content.